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Elwasif, Wael

Publications and source records attributed to Elwasif, Wael.

At least 19 records

Towards Sustainable Post-Exascale Leadership Computing

As computing systems approach the limits of traditional silicon technology, the diminishing returns in performance per watt present a significant barrier to sustaining growth in HPC. From a large-scale scientific supercomputing facility point of view, we propose a multifaceted strategy toward specialized hardware and architectures that are optimized for energy efficiency in specific applications. We also emphasize the need for integrating energy-aware practices across all levels of HPC, from system design and software development to operational policies. We discuss strategic opportunities such as the adoption of application-specific accelerators, the development of energy-efficient algorithms, and the implementation of data-driven operational analytics. Our goal is to develop a comprehensive roadmap ensuring that future leadership systems at OLCF can meet scientific demands while operating within stringent energy budgets, thereby supporting sustainable computing growth.

Shin, Woong↗

Workflows Community Summit 2024: Future Trends and Challenges in Scientific Workflows

The 2024 Workflows Community Summit report presents the outcomes of a three-day international gathering that brought together 109 experts from 18 countries to discuss future trends and challenges in scientific workflows. The summit focused on six key areas: time-sensitive workflows, convergence of AI and HPC workflows, multi-facility workflows, heterogeneous HPC environments, user experience and interfaces, and FAIR computational workflows. Discussions highlighted emerging challenges such as integrating AI with traditional HPC, managing workflows across diverse facilities, addressing heterogeneity in computing environments, and ensuring workflows are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The report outlines recent advances, ongoing challenges, and provides recommendations for each topic area, emphasizing the need for standardization, improved interoperability, and the development of more sophisticated tools and frameworks to support the evolving landscape of scientific workflows in the era of exascale computing and AI integration.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ASGarD: Adaptive Sparse Grid Discretization

Many areas of science exhibit physical processes that are described by high dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs), e.g., the 4D, 5D and 6D models describing magnetized fusion plasmas, models describing quantum chemistry, or derivatives pricing. Such problems are affected by the so-called “curse of dimensionality” where the number of degrees of freedom (or unknowns) required to be solved for scales as N D where N is the number of grid points in any given dimension D. A simple, albeit naive, 6D example is demonstrated in the left panel of Figure 1. With N = 1000 grid points in each dimension, the memory required just to store the solution vector, not to mention forming the matrix required to advance such a system in time, would exceed an exabyte - and also the available memory on the largest of supercomputers available today. The right panel of Figure 1 demonstrates potential savings for a range of problem dimensionalities and grid resolution. While there are methods to simulate such high-dimensional systems, they are mostly based on Monte-Carlo methods, which rely on a statistical sampling such that the resulting solutions include noise. Since the noise in such methods can only be reduced at a rate proportional to $\sqrt{N_p}$ where N p is the number of Monte-Carlo samples, there is a need for continuum, or grid/mesh-based methods for high-dimensional problems, which both do not suffer from noise and bypass the curse of dimensionality. We present a simulation framework that provides such a method using adaptive sparse grids.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Experimental Characterization of OpenMP Offloading Memory Operations and Unified Shared Memory Support

The OpenMP specification recently introduced support for unified shared memory, allowing implementation to leverage underlying system software to provide a simpler GPU offloading model where explicit mapping of variables is optional. Support for this feature is becoming more available in different OpenMP implementations on several hardware platforms. A deeper understanding of the different implementation’s execution profile and performance is crucial for applications as they consider the performance portability implications of adopting a unified memory offloading programming style. This work introduces a benchmark tool to characterize unified memory support in several OepnMP compilers and runtimes, with emphasis on identifying discrepancies between different OpenMP implementations as to how they various memory allocation strategies interact with unified shared memory. The benchmark tool is used to characterize OpenMP compilers on three leading High Performance Computing platforms supporting different CPU and device architectures. The benchmark tool is used to assess the impact of enabling unified shared memory on the performance of memory-bound code, highlighting implementation differences that should be accounted for when applications consider performance portability across platforms and compilers.

Elwasif, Wael↗

Towards a Standard Process Management Infrastructure for Workflows Using Python

Orchestrating the execution of ensembles of processes lies at the core of scientific workflow engines on large scale parallel platforms. This is usually handled using platform-specific command line tools, with limited process management control and potential strain on system resources. The PMIx standard provides a uniform interface to system resources. The low level C implementation of PMIx has hampered its use in workflow engines, leading to the development of Python binding that has yet to gain traction. In this paper, we present our work to harden the PMIx Python client, demonstrating its usability using a prototype Python driver to orchestrate the execution of an ensemble of processes. We present experimental results using the prototype on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This work lays the foundation for wider adoption of PMIx for workflow engines, and encourages wider support of more PMIx functionality in vendor provided system software stacks.

Elwasif, Wael↗

Workflows Community Summit 2022: A Roadmap Revolution

Scientific workflows have become integral tools in broad scientific computing use cases. Science discovery is increasingly dependent on workflows to orchestrate large and complex scientific experiments that range from the execution of a cloud-based data preprocessing pipeline to multi-facility instrument-to-edge-to-HPC computational workflows. Given the changing landscape of scientific computing (often referred to as a computing continuum) and the evolving needs of emerging scientific applications, it is paramount that the development of novel scientific workflows and system functionalities seek to increase the efficiency, resilience, and pervasiveness of existing systems and applications. Specifically, the proliferation of machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) workflows, need for processing large-scale datasets produced by instruments at the edge, intensification of near real-time data processing, support for long-term experiment campaigns, and emergence of quantum computing as an adjunct to HPC, have significantly changed the functional and operational requirements of workflow systems. Workflow systems now need to, for example, support data streams from the edge-to-cloud-to-HPC, enable the management of many small-sized files, allow data reduction while ensuring high accuracy, orchestrate distributed services (workflows, instruments, data movement, provenance, publication, etc.) across computing and user facilities, among others. Further, to accelerate science, it is also necessary that these systems implement specifications/standards and APIs for seamless (horizontal and vertical) integration between systems and applications, as well as enable the publication of workflows and their associated products according to the FAIR principles.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Application Experiences on a GPU-Accelerated Arm-based HPC Testbed

This paper assesses and reports the experience of ten teams working to port, validate, and benchmark several High Performance Computing applications on a novel GPU-accelerated Arm testbed system. The testbed consists of eight NVIDIA Arm HPC Developer Kit systems, each one equipped with a server-class Arm CPU from Ampere Computing and two data center GPUs from NVIDIA Corp. The systems are connected together using InfiniBand interconnect. The selected applications and mini-apps are written using several programming languages and use multiple accelerator-based programming models for GPUs such as CUDA, OpenACC, and OpenMP offloading. Working on application porting requires a robust and easy-to-access programming environment, including a variety of compilers and optimized scientific libraries. The goal of this work is to evaluate platform readiness and assess the effort required from developers to deploy well-established scientific workloads on current and future generation Arm-based GPU-accelerated HPC systems. The reported case studies demonstrate that the current level of maturity and diversity of software and tools is already adequate for large-scale production deployments.

Elwasif, Wael↗

$\mathrm{RADICAL}$-Pilot and $\mathrm{PMIx}$/$\mathrm{PRRTE}$: Executing Heterogeneous Workloads at Large Scale on Partitioned $\mathrm{HPC}$ Resources

Execution of heterogeneous workflows on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms present unprecedented resource management and execution coordination challenges for runtime systems. Task heterogeneity increases the complexity of resource and execution management, limiting the scalability and efficiency of workflow execution. Re-source partitioning and distribution of tasks execution over portioned re-sources promises to address those problems but we lack an experimental evaluation of its performance at scale. Here this paper provides a performance evaluation of the Process Management Interface for Exascale (PMIx) and its reference implementation PRRTE on the leadership-class HPC plat-form Summit, when integrated into a pilot-based runtime system called RADICAL-Pilot. We partition resources across multiple PRRTE Distributed Virtual Machine (DVM) environments, responsible for launching tasks via the PMIx interface. We experimentally measure the work-load execution performance in terms of task scheduling/launching rate and distribution of DVM task placement times, DVM startup and termination overheads on the Summit leadership-class HPC platform. Integrated solution with PMIx/PRRTE enables using an abstracted, standardized set of interfaces for orchestrating the launch process, dynamic process management and monitoring capabilities. It extends scaling capabilities allowing to overcome a limitation of other launching mechanisms (e.g., JSM/LSF). Explored different DVM setup configurations provide insights on DVM performance and a layout to leverage it. Our experimental results show that heterogeneous workload of 65,500 tasks on 2048 nodes, and partitioned across 32 DVMs, runs steady with resource utilization not lower than 52%. While having less concurrently executed tasks resource utilization is able to reach up to 85%, based on results of heterogeneous workload of 8200 tasks on 256 nodes and 2 DVMs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Adaptive Generation of Training Data for ML Reduced Model Creation

Machine learning proxy models are often used to speed up or completely replace complex computational models. The greatly reduced and deterministic computational costs enable new use cases such as digital twin control systems and global optimization. The challenge of building these proxy models is generating the training data. A naive uniform sampling of the input space can result in a non-uniform sampling of the output space of a model. This can cause gaps in the training data coverage that can miss finer scale details resulting in poor accuracy. While larger and larger data sets could eventually fill in these gaps, the computational burden of full-scale simulation codes can make this prohibitive. In this paper, we present an adaptive data generation method that utilizes uncertainty estimation to identify regions where training data should be augmented. By targeting data generation to areas of need, representative data sets can be generated efficiently. The effectiveness of this method will be demonstrated on a simple one-dimensional function and a complex multidimensional physics model.

Cianciosa, Mark↗

HPC Molecular Simulation Tries Out a New GPU: Experiences on Early AMD Test Systems for the Frontier Supercomputer

Molecular simulation is an important tool for nu- merous efforts in physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences. Simulating molecular dynamics requires extremely rapid cal- culations to enable sufficient sampling of simulated temporal molecular processes. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX Frontier supercomputer installed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) will provide an exascale resource for open science, and will feature graphics processing units (GPUs) from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The future LUMI supercomputer in Finland will be based on an HPE Cray EX platform as well. Here we test the ports of several widely used molecular dynamics packages that have each made substantial use of acceleration with NVIDIA GPUs, on Spock, the early Cray pre-Frontier testbed system at the OLCF which employs AMD GPUs. These programs are used extensively in industry for pharmaceutical and materials research, as well as academia, and are also frequently deployed on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, including national leadership HPC resources. We find that in general, performance is competitive and installation is straightforward, even at these early stages in a new GPU ecosystem. Our experiences point to an expanding arena for GPU vendors in HPC for molecular simulation.

Sedova, Ada↗

Portability for GPU-accelerated molecular docking applications for cloud and HPC: can portable compiler directives provide performance across all platforms?

High-throughput structure-based screening of drug-like molecules has become a common tool in biomedical research. Recently, acceleration with graphics processing units (GPUs) has provided a large performance boost for molecular docking programs. Both cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) resources have been used for large screens with molecular docking programs; while NVIDIA GPUs have dominated cloud and HPC resources, new vendors such as AMD and Intel are now entering the field, creating the problem of software portability across different GPUs. Ideally, software productivity could be maximized with portable programming models that are able to maintain high performance across architectures. While in many cases compiler directives have been used as an easy way to offload parallel regions of a CPU-based program to a GPU accelerator, they may also be an attractive programming model for providing portability across different GPU vendors, in which case the porting process may proceed in the reverse direction: from low-level, architecture-specific code to higher-level directive-based abstractions. MiniMDock is a new mini-application (miniapp) designed to capture the essential computational kernels found in molecular docking calculations, such as are used in phar-maceutical drug discovery efforts, in order to test different solutions for porting across GPU architectures. Here we extend MiniMDock to GPU offloading with OpenMP directives, and compare to performance of kernels using CUDA and HIP on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, respectively, as well as across different compilers, exploring performance bottlenecks. We document this reverse-porting process, from highly optimized device code to a higher-level version using directives, compare code structure, and describe barriers that were overcome in this effort.

Thavappiragasam, Mathialakan↗

Machine-Learning Accelerated Studies of Materials with High Performance and Edge Computing

In the studies of materials, experimental measurements often serve as the reference to verify physics theory and modeling; while theory and modeling provide a fundamental understanding of the physics and principles behind. However, the interactions and cross validation between them have long been a challenge even to-date. Not only that inferring a physics model from experimental data is itself a difficult inverse problem, another major challenge is the orders-of-magnitude longer wall-clock time required to carry out high-fidelity computer modeling to match the timescale of experiments. We envisage that by combining high performance computing, data science, and edge computing technology, the current predicament can be alleviated, and a new paradigm of data-driven physics research will open up. For example, we can accelerate computer simulations by first performing the large-scale modeling on high performance computers and train a machine-learned surrogate model. This computationally inexpensive surrogate model can then be transferred to the computing units residing closely to the experimental facilities to perform high-fidelity simulations at a much higher throughout. The model will also be more amenable to analyzing and validating experimental observations in comparable time scales at a much lower computational cost. Further integration of these accelerated computer simulations with an outer machine learning loop can also inform and direct future experiments, while making the inverse problem of physics model inference more tractable. We will demonstrate a proof-of-concept by using a quantum Monte Carlo application, Dynamical Cluster Approximation (DCA++), to machine-learn a surrogate model and accelerate the study of quantum correlated materials.

Li, Ying Wai↗

High-Performance Deep Learning Toolbox for Genome-Scale Prediction of Protein Structure and Function

Computational biology is one of many scientific disciplines ripe for innovation and acceleration with the advent of high-performance computing (HPC). In recent years, the field of machine learning has also seen significant benefits from adopting HPC practices. In this work, we present a novel HPC pipeline that incorporates various machine-learning approaches for structure-based functional annotation of proteins on the scale of whole genomes. Our pipeline makes extensive use of deep learning and provides computational insights into best practices for training advanced deep-learning models for high-throughput data such as proteomics data. We showcase methodologies our pipeline currently supports and detail future tasks for our pipeline to envelop, including large-scale sequence comparison using SAdLSA and prediction of protein tertiary structures using AlphaFold2.

Gao, Mu↗

QuaSiMo: A composable library to program hybrid workflows for quantum simulation

Abstract A composable design scheme is presented for the development of hybrid quantum/classical algorithms and workflows for applications of quantum simulation. The proposed object‐oriented approach is based on constructing an expressive set of common data structures and methods that enables programming of a broad variety of complex hybrid quantum simulation applications. The abstract core of the scheme is distilled from the analysis of the current quantum simulation algorithms. Subsequently, it allows synthesis of new hybrid algorithms and workflows via the extension, specialisation, and dynamic customisation of the abstract core classes defined by the proposed design. The design scheme is implemented using the hardware‐agnostic programming language QCOR into the QuaSiMo library. To validate the implementation, the authors test and show its utility on commercial quantum processors from IBM and Rigetti, running some prototypical quantum simulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Integrated model predictions on the impact of substrate damage on gas dynamics during ITER burning-plasma operations

Divertor design and choice of plasma-facing materials (PFM) will be essential to the success of next-generation fusion reactors as they operate under more powerful scenarios. Understanding and controlling interactions between the plasma and PFM is essential to making these choices. Within these plasma–material interactions and especially in tungsten (W), the interplay between the most abundant plasma species (hydrogen isotopes and helium, He) with the wall material alters fuel retention. However, this interplay is yet to be sufficiently understood to confidently project fuel retention levels to future fusion devices. The paper presents a series of integrated simulations of fusion plasmas and their interaction with tungsten. Specifically, this study assesses the impact of He plasma pre-exposure on hydrogenic species retention during 100 s of burning plasma operations (BPO) in ITER. Multiple pre-exposure scenarios are considered, including sub-surface damage resulting from exposures in the linear device PISCES and from early ITER He-operation. The predictions from these consecutive He-BPO exposures show that fuel content and spatial distribution in the material are largely determined by the He-induced damage, as manifest in: (i) changes in surface temperature expected during BPO have little effect on fuel retention in the presence of He-induced damage; (ii) gas content stabilizes quickly in substrates pre-exposed in PISCES, at levels set by the concentration of pre-existing vacancies, while it continues to increase in substrates initially pristine or pre-exposed to ITER He plasmas; (iii) the presence of He and He–V clusters in the near-surface region locally increases hydrogenic retention, but decreases its permeation; this results in hydrogenic species that remain closer to the surface in pre-damaged substrates, while the bulk content is higher for initially pristine cases. In summary, the interaction and binding of D and T with the pre-existing He–V clusters modifies retention and permeation of hydrogen species during ITER BPO.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Virtual Framework for Development and Testing of Federation Software Stack

Softwarization of networked infrastructures combined with containerization of codes promises unprecedented computing capabilities distributed across the federations of computing systems and physical instruments. The development and testing of a software stack that implements these capabilities over an expensive physical production infrastructure is not cost-effective, and in the early stages, may potentially cause service disruptions. To address these aspects, we develop the Virtual Federated Science Instrument Environment (VFSIE), a digital twin of the physical infrastructure that emulates a multi-site federation. Each federated site is emulated using containers and virtual hosts that are connected over local-area networks, and the sites, in turn, are connected over an emulated wide-area network. We describe the framework design and implementation details. We also illustrate its application by emulating a federation of four laboratories that use Jupyter Notebook for computations and the EPICS software system for instrument control.

Al Najjar, Anees↗